Spinning Plates
by Moonshine
Summary: Running away, finding home, and the fall of grace. The lost years of Elena's life.


Title: Spinning Plates  
Author: Moonshine  
Completed: January 22nd, 2003  
  
Authors Notes:  
This particular story might need a touch of backstory, just because it, well, IS backstory. As such, it does not stand alone. The Elena in this fic is a piece of fanon that I RP with. The general idea is this: Elena comes from a generally high-class family that discreetly specializes in blackmail and manipulation. She meets Tseng, who takes an interest in her, and more importantly sparks *her* interest in the, er, hired gun lifestyle. Impressionable little kid. Over the course of a few years, things begin to pretty much take a downward spin (that I won't go into detail on, right now at least), eventually forcing her to go to a correctional school. Which leaves you at this story's beginning.  
  
Reviews are loved and always replied to, but even better are a) specific words and phrases that intrigued you, and b) suggestions of where I can improve, even if it's just a word I could substitute for another. I appreciate any and all input.  
  
Characters are Squaresoft's, copyright 1997. Writing is mine. That being said, please read and enjoy.  
  
"You are on your own  
You do as you please  
Having so much fun  
Gone and lost your reason  
After all is said and done  
Are you still having fun?"  
- Eagle Eye Cherry  
  
  
Her letters home had always been scarce and tightly worded. No one noticed when they stopped being letters so much as words on brittle yellow post-it notes and dried out baby-wipes.  
  
It had been easy, sometime in her third year at Lady Mary's Correctional, to leave. The check to the school had one too many zeros, a carefully crafted misdirection on Elena's part.  
  
At fourteen she had a lingering high class accent, wickedly innocent eyes, and pale pink lips like seashells. The headmaster cashed the excess money in Elena's own account, on glory of her 'continued good behavior'.  
  
She was gone a week later. None of the brothers at the school could remember signing the formal release documents. Elena had vanished like she had never been, and somewhere in the inky upward sprawl of Upper Midgar a raven-haired Turk rolled over and couldn't sleep.  
  
***  
  
Sometimes, she wished for breakfast like they served in the cafeteria before classes. Sometimes, it was the abundance of clean sheets. Often she missed the clean water piped all the way from Icicle.  
  
Most of the time, she wished she never left. This was one of those times.  
  
It wasn't as bad as trying to dethrone a seasoned transient from their grate just to find a place to sleep. The apartment, while nowhere near the way of life she'd been used to, was better than wet pavement and cold, stiff joints in the morning. ...still; with the rising sun only barely penetrating the constant haze over Midgar, the street below waking up to honking, screeching traffic, and countless other petty morning disturbances... it was hard to really appreciate her circumstances.  
  
Sometime during the night there had been visitors, and they hadn't left. When Elena got home from her late shift sometime in the ass end of the morning her bedroom door had been locked against her, and the sounds of many bodies sleeping inside were seeping through the panelboard.  
  
Elena had moved to the couch. It was simpler that way.  
  
In the morning she awoke too early to the sounds of too many people trying to be quiet. There were no lights on in the living room, but the blanket she'd pillaged from the back of the couch couldn't even filter out the weak sunlight. There had been the sound of the sliding door to the porch opening, and footsteps, and the creak of the railing as someone leaned over it and retched. Silence as they passed out, bent over the railing. And the sudden chill as the accumulated body heat in the apartment escaped into the February air.  
  
The floor had been cold on the soles of her feet as she righted herself on the couch, and a passing someone ruffled her hair and greeted her good morning, blondie, would it kill her to smile and would she like some cereal? She had waved her middle finger half-heartedly at him, and yawned. She needed socks.  
  
Her room was still locked, and the sounds of snoring still echoed within. The bastards had relocked the door.  
  
Her memory in her later years tells her that this is where her life sped up, but right then it was all she could do to kick the door and curse unoriginally under her breath. The next best thing, besides clean clothes, was to close the door against the bitter, damp cold of Midgar.  
  
Years later, she would tell herself that this morning never happened, that she hadn't taken that shift at the Lucky Gil Mart, that there had never been a miscalculation in her manipulation. That the transfer of her family's trust fund to her own private account had gone smoothly, and complications had not left her scrambling for a monetary foothold. More importantly, she told herself that she had come home at a decent hour, boosted the visitors out of her room, and forced them to find somewhere else to sleep than her bed, than her apartment.  
  
In her memory, she never had met Robert Elliot Graeme on this morning.  
  
He'd been the one on the porch, passed out over the railing, one of the guests that had usurped her room the night before. Spite rose in her empty stomach and her cold fingers clenched, but... Elena had never been really one to leave someone out in the cold. So it was his deadweight body that she dragged inside and heaved onto the creaking, sagging couch. Thinking back, it was an auspicious meeting indeed.  
  
The first things he did were to say to her 'G'morning, blondie,' and discreetly belch, and Elena'd wrinkled her nose at his both his vomit breath and the horrible nickname that everyone seemed to get the first time around. And he'd smirked in that lazy, absorbed way that people in this part of the city had, and dangled his toe-thong hemp sandals over the arm of the couch. Was there breakfast, he had asked.  
She distinctly remembers laughing in his face and turning on her heel towards the kitchen, with its little guttering light and sounds of food.  
  
Later, he'd come up behind her as she was boiling runny eggs and leftover chicken in a sandwich bag, and wrapped his arms around her chest. He dwarfed her, all broad shoulders and flat chest, and he smelled mostly of expensive beer. He said his name was Scab. She called herself Francesca, Queen of the Kwik-e-Mart, and elbowed him in his ripped-tee clad stomach.  
  
R. E. Graeme, he said. Rob. He ran a hand through his dark, thickly wavy hair and offered it to Elena, and for a second he was gangly and twitchy and some part of her had liked that, at the time. He moved like a set of rotating blocks, like something folding out of itself to become something else. Like ungreased pistons.   
  
His tee-shirt said, in tiny letters, 'no breed', and was two sizes too small over a mesh shirt two sizes too large.  
  
She took his hand.  
  
***  
  
A few months later, the bank and her father's hired men had tracked her to the apartment she, Rob, and various changing others shared.  
  
As the entire building burnt away into the night, lighting up the jagged horizon of Midgar like fire behind a dragon's teeth, she had been crouching across the street in an alley with Rob. Countless lives had been lost in that fire.  
  
She'd never really felt an attachment to the creaky old building, anyway.  
  
It eventually caved in with a groan, and a shattering, and finally a screech - like the city had come alive and felt the hot timber hit it's skin. Elena turned away from the sudden outward gust of scalding air, and began to walk away into the crackling night.  
  
Once again, Elena had vanished. And this time, a certain Turk rolled up his car window and made a note to make sure she didn't show up deceased on her Shinra file.  
  
~fin~ 


End file.
